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Crazy Horse - Native American Indians - Spirit world

Identifier

Type of Spiritual Experience

Background

A description of the experience

Black Elk Speaks – as told through John Neihardt

Crazy Horse’s father was my father’s cousin, and there were no chiefs in our family before Crazy Horse; but there were holy men; and he became a chief because of the power he got in a vision when he was a boy.

When I was a man, my father told me something about the vision. Of course he did not know all of it, but he said that Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things.

That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world. He was on his horse in that world and the horse and himself on it and the trees and the grass and the stones and everything made of spirit and nothing was hard, and everything seemed to float. His horse was standing still there, and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow, and that is how he got his name, which does not mean that his horse was crazy or wild, but that in his vision it danced around in a queer way.